JULY 30, 2019
Journalists routinely
dehumanize human beings crossing the southern border by comparing them to
natural disasters like a “flood”
or “deluge.”
But while migration has always been a natural phenomenon, the increasingly
forced migration of people escaping deteriorating conditions is an unnatural
disaster driven, in part, by climate disruption.
The New Yorker (4/3/19)
reported on how droughts, floods and changes to weather patterns have
contributed to crop susceptibility to diseases and pests, degraded soil quality
and shortened growing seasons. Reuters (5/2/19)
covered UN estimates that 2.2 million people Central Americans have been
affected by poor harvests as a result of climate change, with up to four in
every five families having to sell animals and farm equipment to buy food in
the past year.
It would be easy for even a
diligent news consumer to not know that climate change is one of the central
factors driving refugees to cross the border, since it’s usually not
mentioned at all in most alarmist reports about the so-called “border
crisis” (New York Times, 4/10/19; Wall
Street Journal, 5/8/19).
In fact, although a few good articles have been dedicated to making the
connection (e.g., New York Times, 4/13/19; Washington
Post, 4/16/19),
it’s usually absent even among reports purporting to explain why people are
making the dangerous journey.
Politico (3/28/19)
Politico’s “Here’s What’s
Driving the ‘Crisis’ at the Border” (3/28/19)
and Vox’s “The Border Is in Crisis. Here’s How It Got This Bad” (4/11/19)
both correctly note that the Trump administration’s claims about “unprecedented
numbers of undocumented immigrants” crossing the border from Central American
countries like Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are “untrue,” because,
as Vox put it, the
total number of people coming
into the US without papers is still lower than it was for most of the 20th
century, and substantially lower its turn-of-the-century peak.
However, the strained
resources from more families and children crossing the border, as well as the
complications of the asylum process, figure heavily into their explanation for
how the crisis “got so bad”—rather than the five-year drought ruining the crops
of maize, coffee, bananas and beans depended on by mostly subsistence
farmers, also known as campesinos, in Central America. The drought is
also disrupting the traditional seasonal migration to harvest coffee in
Honduras that Central American families have used to ease poverty, forcing them
to flee to the US instead (Al-Jazeera, 5/13/19).
Politico’s report explained
the border crisis with statements from Republican and Border Patrol officials
noting how the “rise in families” and the “greater volume of children among the
new Central American migrants” are creating a “capacity crisis,” unlike the
less-needy single adult males from Mexico who “constituted most border
migrants” a decade earlier, with increased asylum applications creating a
longer immigration process.
Vox’s report observed that “we
don’t have apples-to-apples data,” because there’s “substantial evidence that
the raw number of children and families entering the US is higher than it’s
ever been,” while also noting that “crushing poverty” and “gang violence” are
factors, in addition to many migrants themselves not knowing “what asylum is,”
or why they “might not qualify for it.”
Atlantic (6/26/18)
The Atlantic’s account,
“Today’s Migrant Flow Is Different” (6/26/18),
likewise explained that “the crux of the recent crisis at the border” is that
there are
fewer male migrants in their
20s or 30s making the crossing, and many more families, newborns, children and
pregnant women escaping life-or-death situations as much as poverty.
That’s how the outlet
differentiated today’s “migrant flow” from previous decades, where Central
Americans were fleeing “economic misery in their war-torn states.” The Atlantic actually
mentioned that “previous US policies contributed to the extreme insecurity in
their home countries,” but only discussed the US policy of deporting “tens of
thousands of convicted criminals to Central America in the early 2000s,” and
nothing else regarding why “thousands of Central American families” are “stuck
between a rock and a hard place.”
Time’s “‘There Is No Way We
Can Turn Back’: Why Thousands of Refugees Will Keep Coming to America Despite
Trump’s Crackdown” (6/21/18)
and NBC’s “Why Are So Many Migrants Crossing the US border? It Often
Starts With an Escape From Violence in Central America” (6/20/18)
described, not inaccurately but incompletely, migrants escaping “high levels of
violence” from organized crime groups like “street gangs” and “drug cartels,”
in addition to citing “corruption, weak and unstable government institutions,”
and the “unrelenting turmoil of the region.”
NBC’s report mentions that
“the conditions” in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras came to “Americans’
attention in full force” in 2014, when “tens of thousands of children arrived
on their own” at the US border, without discussing that year’s climate change–related
drought. A year later, NBC (7/9/19)
would note 2014 as the year the drought began, as it cited immigration analysts
and UN
reports finding that “roughly half” of all adults apprehended at the
border worked “in agriculture,” with a “lack of food” being the primary reason
people leave.
Bloomberg (7/5/19)
Bloomberg (7/5/19)
offered the victim-blaming headline “Why Roots of US Border Crisis Lie South of
Mexico,” and noted that Honduras and El Salvador have among the “highest murder
rates in the world.” It depicted Central American migrants as seeking economic
opportunity, noting that 60 percent of the population in Honduras and Guatemala
lives below the national poverty line, and characterizing those countries as “a
hotbed of poverty, corruption, gang violence and extortion.”
In all these reports, the
US’s contributions
to the violence and corruption in Central America during
the Cold War, and more recent US support for a 2009
military coup in Honduras deposing the democratically elected
left-wing President Manuel Zelaya, and its funding for death
squads in the country, are completely obscured. This despite the
evidence (Migration Policy Institute, 4/1/06)
that US-backed violence in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador during the Cold
War “institutionalized” a migration pattern to North America that had been
“very minor” beforehand.
But if these reports shrouded
the connection between US foreign policy and the “violence” and “unrelenting
turmoil” in the region, they more deeply buried the connection between
increasing violence and climate change.
In fact, the Pentagon has long
viewed climate change as a “threat multiplier,” and an indirect factor that
could prompt outbreaks of violence in countries already staggering under the
weight of other problems (Guardian, 3/31/14).
Military planners point to the Syrian civil war—which has killed hundreds of
thousands—as an example of how climate change contributes to violent conflict,
with the worst drought there in 500 years creating massive internal
displacement that led to government repression and sectarian violence (Inside
Climate News, 6/13/19).
Guardian (10/30/18)
And while poverty is often
featured along with “violence” among the list of things Central American
refugees are fleeing, corporate media rarely discuss why so many
people there are impoverished, and the connection to the ongoing climate
catastrophe. In contrast, the Guardian(10/30/18)
informed readers:
“The focus on violence is
eclipsing the big picture—which is that people are saying they are moving
because of some version of food insecurity,” said Robert Albro, a researcher at
the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University.
“The main reason people are
moving is because they don’t have anything to eat. This has a strong link to
climate change—we are seeing tremendous climate instability that is radically
changing food security in the region.”
Migrants don’t often
specifically mention “climate change” as a motivating factor for leaving,
because the concept is so abstract and long-term, Albro said. But people in the
region who depend on small farms are painfully aware of changes to weather
patterns that can ruin crops and decimate incomes.
Guatemala, Honduras and El
Salvador are part of the Dry Corridor, a region where droughts, tropical storms
and flash floods are common, but climate change is influencing the severity and
frequency of these disasters, and consecutive droughts can devastate the
livelihoods of campesinos completely dependent on what they grow for
survival. Unlike in the US and Europe, there are no crop insurance or aid
programs, and often no irrigation systems either, to assist people in difficult
times (Public Radio International, 2/6/19).
Climate scientist Noah
Diffenbaugh (Grist, 4/23/19)—lead
author of a Stanford University study finding that the economic gap between the
richest and poorest countries is about 25 percent greater than it would’ve been
without anthropogenic climate change—stated that “most of the poorest countries
on Earth are considerably poorer than they would’ve been without global
warming.”
Climate change is also a
major—yet often omitted—reason for the record
number of African migrants crossing the US/Mexican border fleeing
violence and poverty. The EU has exacerbated this, mirroring the Trump
administration’s policy of making it as painful as possible for refugees to
apply for asylum by making civil war–torn Libya the main processing center for
applications (Foreign Policy, 6/26/19).
The UN’s 2019
Sustainable Development Goals Report found that “extreme poverty today
is concentrated and overwhelmingly affects rural populations,” and that it’s
increasingly being “exacerbated by violent conflicts and climate change.” It
also found that 413 million out of the estimated 736 million people still
living in extreme poverty are in Sub-Saharan Africa, where most of the new
migrants are coming from, and the region with “the highest prevalence of
hunger,” as the number of undernourished people increased from 195 million in
2014 to 237 million in 2017.
CNN (4/1/19)
The UN’s Food and Agricultural
Organization found that
the 2015–16 El Niño phenomenon afflicting Central America—a
warming of the Pacific Ocean surface that causes hotter and drier conditions
there—was the strongest it’s been in 50 years, and was also affecting
Sub-Saharan Africa’s food security, with 32 million people in the region unable
to acquire food in 2016 due to dry weather conditions. The FAO (CNN, 4/1/19)
noted that “evolving climatic patterns characterized by cyclic droughts, floods
and cyclones have become more frequent in Southern Africa.”
Corporate media downplaying
the ongoing climate catastrophe’s creation of large numbers of climate refugees
encourages fatal inaction. The UN is warning of more than 120 million people
pushed into poverty by 2030, and a “climate apartheid”
scenario where the wealthy countries most
responsible for carbon emissions are leaving the rest of the world
with a stark “choice” between starvation and migration.
This is not one story, fit for
the occasional Sunday piece, but many everyday stories, of which human movement
across national borders is only one. Media have a responsibility to not only
tell these stories, but to link them to climate disruption, if they intend to
be part not of the problem but of the solution.
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